The gifted young Mexican actor Diego Luna made a major impression in Alfonso Cuarón's Y tu mamá también and went on to play the baby-faced, Hispanic cowhand in Kevin Costner's Open Range and Sean Penn's lover in Milk. Abel, his confident, highly promising directorial debut, centres around a striking performance from Christopher Ruíz-Esparza as the eponymous nine-year-old lad, a seriously disturbed patient released from a hospital in a provincial Mexican town into the custody of his mother pending his transfer to a more sophisticated mental institution in distant Mexico City.

He has apparently not spoken since his father left to find work in the States and now watches TV throughout the night in the family's dilapidated, jerry-built house on the edge of town. Suddenly he begins to speak, which seems like the breakthrough his mother and his kindly doctor seek. But his voice is commandingly, parodically paternal as he assumes the position of father to his five-year-old brother Paúl and his 15-year-old sister Selene and husband to his mother. Then Anselmo, his feckless, macho father, comes home, revealing that far from having crossed the Rio Grande, he's been up north in Saltillo creating a new family. Cue a succession of disasters.

Part Freudian casebook, part satirical fable about absent or delinquent Mexican fathers, Abel is a straight-faced Buñuelian tragicomedy assaulting the absurdities of bourgeois life. After its edgy, deliberately puzzling first hour, it starts to run out of steam, but at 85 minutes it doesn't overstay its welcome.